Walking wounded

I sympathize with the zombies on "The Walking Dead". I feel like I've spent the last year shambling through my life, just trying to find somewhere quiet to rest. That's all the zombies want - somewhere quiet to rest. Oh, and brains. I can relate to that as well. I haven't felt like I've had a brain since March 9, when I got diagnosed with breast cancer.

Looking back over this past year, it's a blur. A blur of doctors and surgeons and research and information and non-information. Worries, both legitimate and not so much. Panic. Fear. Sadness. Anger.

And then nothing at all. Zombieland.

It's hard to even process now. I guess our brains go into zombie mode in order to deal with  so much awful. 

I've spent most of the last year just getting up and getting through. My art kept me going and made me feel alive. The relationship with the Filmmaker filled me with such light and pleasure. But then - back to zombieland.

Even now, going through radiation, which is nowhere near as bad as chemo, I'm still semi-zombie-like. I get up in the morning, put on clothes, grab my little talisman and go to radiation. I'm home very quickly - I'm gone maybe an hour total. But even this part of treatment zaps my energy and leaves me prone on the couch much of the time. I'm fighting exhaustion just sitting here at the coffee shop writing this but I didn't want to waste yet another day just laying on the couch.

I'm ready to de-zombie-fy. My last radiation treatment should be January 23 and then probably a month or so of tests and poking and prodding. And a new drug that I have to take for five years. But hopefully as I move into February, I will be less "Walking Dead" and more walking wounded.

It's funny because most of my wounds have been on the inside - emotional, personal, things no one really sees. Now, I wear my wounds like a warrior. The scar on my left breast and under my arm. The bright red tracks of radiation all over the left side of my body, looking like I forgot to wear sunscreen and spent two days on the beach. My 1/4 inch hair, mostly grey, still very thin and feeling kind of like rabbit fur. All my exterior wounds. 

But these wounds and this treatment has led me to one big discovery. The big wound, the big hole I have kept trying to fill for most of my life is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. I've dug a hole, wanting to fill it with unconditional love from somewhere else - family, men, marriages. But nothing has ever filled it. My therapist from the cancer center told me to look at that hole and see what it needs. And once I can figure that out, once I can find that inside of me, then I can help myself move on. Well, what it needed was me, giving myself the unconditional love I so crave.

Okay, now I've wandered from zombies into "Eat Pray Love", god help me. But that's the simple truth. And I got there without reading 200 self-help books. It only took cancer to get me to this point.

Let's see if I can tie this back to zombies.

I have shambled through so much of my life and my relationships numbly, trying to be whatever it is they want. Never looking to see the damage it's doing to me. 

And maybe now that I've learned that there isn't something missing, that I don't need someone's brains or love or whatever, maybe I can find my way back to human. Because what fills that hole is not exterior. It's my art. It's my heart. It's all the things I love about my life that I have brought to myself. I didn't need someone else to create this. I created it.

And I've dealt with my cancer alone, in many ways. I've had so many people be there for me and help me and I don't want to sound ungrateful. But no one was really there on the hardest nights, the hardest times. The times when I didn't think I could get through this. I lived through the darkest times A lesson that has been very hard for me.

So as this chapter of treatment comes to a close, maybe I can eventually escape Zombieland and find somewhere more akin to Oz.

Except without the damn flying monkeys. And wicked witch. And...

Damn...